High assurance guards have been long used to facilitate communication between highly secure networks. Identity and permission management systems have been suggested for use in cross-domain systems. However, the methods suggested in the past, such as in an article by Mel Crocker in the March 2007 issue of Cross-Talk, The Journal of Defense Software Engineering, entitled Cross-Domain Information Sharing in a Tactical Environment, may suffer from requirements for heavy encryption and from a distributed local audit. Traditional cross-domain systems, such as the Turnstile system currently sold by Rockwell Collins Inc., are capable of examining individual protocol data packets and determining whether those packets should be transmitted from one secure network to another secure network, based upon a set of rules. However, in such cross-domain systems to achieve the desired performance, it is necessary to avoid the encryption overhead and distributed audit systems and instead currently trust that the source of these data packets is authentic and the source is authorized to send these types of packets.
Consequently, there exists a need for eliminating non=authentic sources of data and unauthorized sources of data in such cross-domain systems, while not unduly burdening the core cross domain system with complex authentication and authorization processing.